Why the
U.S. Executive Branch Is a Clear and Present Danger to Our
Democracy
Congress, judiciary and the mass media no longer provide
constitutionally mandated checks and balances; they are largely
extensions of Executive power.

By Fred Branfman

July 18, 2013 "Information
Clearing House
-Edward Snowden's revelations have illuminated
the most critical political issue facing America today: how
an authoritarian U.S. Executive Branch which has focused on
war abroad for the last 50 years now devotes increasing
resources to surveillance, information management, and
population control at home, posing a far greater threat to
Americans' liberties than any conceivable foreign foe.

Snowden's view of the basic issue is that
"I don't want to live in a world where everything that I
say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression
of creativity or love or friendship, is recorded. That's not
something I'm willing to live under."

Whether millions of other Americans accept
the new surveillance status quo will determine the future
not only of privacy but democracy in this nation. For even
the critical issue of U.S. government of surveillance is
only a part of a far larger pattern of undemocratic and
unaccountable Executive Branch behavior, at home and abroad.
The problem is not only that the Executive Branch operates
in antidemocratic secrecy, with an “Insider
Threat Program” that even requires its employees to
inform on each other or risk losing their jobs. It has also
subverted the Congress, judiciary and mass media, so that
they no longer provide constitutionally mandated checks and
balances, and are instead largely today extensions of
Executive power.

How do you feel about the fact that as you
read these words the U.S. Executive Branch is storing
information about your phone calls and Internet messages
which, even years from now, could be used to embarrass,
control and/or harass you, defeat you in an election, cause
you to lose a job, break up your marriage, or even threaten
you with imprisonment? Many say “I have nothing to worry
about, I’m not a Muslim terrorist.” But this displays a
naïve complacency about the massive pools of data the
Executive is collecting that have nothing to do with
protecting us from a relative handful of Muslim terrorists,
and could easily be misused by secret and unaccountable
government agencies in the future.

Even centrists like Tom
Friedman and Bob
Woodward have warned that America could turn into a
"police-state" should another 9/11 occur. And the Executive
Branch has created more of an infrastructure for
such a state than ever in our history under a Democratic
president who professes a belief in civil liberties. Should
a Republican become president in 2016, with a Cheney-like
mindset using “unitary
Executive theory” to grab even more power, democracy
could become little more than a pleasant daydream.

What is most troubling about America's
political class today, who have mostly castigated Snowden
but not even dared criticize a Dianne Feinstein for keeping
U.S. Executive surveillance secret from the American people
she theoretically represents, is not only that they are
"willing to live under" a Surveillance State. It is that
they don't even want to know.

They shoot the messenger rather than dare
face his message, displaying precisely the kind of
complacency that causes democracy to die.

Even decent pundits who oppose excessive
wiretapping have buried their heads in the sand about
Executive threats to democracy. N.Y. Magazine's Jonathan
Chait has put it
in the category of just another "non-scandal" like Benghazi
or the IRS, writing "but when the president is carrying out
duly passed laws and acting at every stage with judicial
approval, then the issue is the laws themselves, not
misconduct." This is
seconded by Paul Krugman: "as Chait says, NSA stuff is a
policy dispute, not the kind of scandal the right wing
wants."

Putting the relevance of NSA spying in the
context of whether it benefits or harms the Republican
party, and falsely claiming that there are meaningful
legislative or judicial checks on Executive power, is
absurd. It points up our psychological difficulty in
accepting the fact that the government we have been taught
since birth protects democracy is today the greatest threat
it faces.

It requires profound changes in the mindsets
that map our lives to realize that we are now paying our
leaders vast sums to deceive, lie to, spy on, monitor and
track us; that our own government threatens freedom of the
press and information far more than any foreign foe; and
that Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, who believe that
the U.S. government should not murder innocents abroad and
spy on Americans at home, shame the rest of us with their
moral commitment to try to save democracy.

And the Executive Branch is geometrically
increasing its threats to democracy at the very moment the
U.S. president has told us
that serious external terrorist threats have significantly
declined, pose a far smaller threat to our lives than our
own automobiles, and are best dealt with by careful police
work conducted jointly with foreign allies. Domestic
surveillance is clearly increasing because powerful
Executive agencies seek more power, budget and staff, not
because they need more money to protect us. There is nothing
new about this. It is what unaccountable bureaucracies do.

The “Fiction That Everybody in Congress
Knows"

But democracy depends on the other branches
of government, and the Fourth Estate, checking its power.
And nothing shames America’s leaders more than their
knowingly perpetrating the fiction that Congress, the
judiciary and mass media are doing so.

On June 5, 2013, for example, President
Obama stated that
”the programs are secret in the sense that they are
classified. They are not secret, in that every member of
Congress has been briefed,"

Asked about this two days later by ABC
News' George Stephanopoulos, Rep. Keith Ellison replied,
"I am not aware of this program that was revealed today. So
I think it's a fiction, it's a fiction that everybody in
Congress knows. We don't know what we don't know."

And those members who serve on the
Intelligence committees learn only what the Executive allows
them to know, "don't know what they don't know," and are
muzzled from doing anything meaningful about even the
limited information they receive. As Jeremy Scahill has explained,
"there are a handful of U.S. senators that are allowed to go
to what's called a secured classified intelligence facility,
a SCIP, and to review certain memos, not all, but certain
memos the White House has deemed appropriate to share with
Congress." And they must come alone without staff, and
"they're not allowed to bring a writing utensil. They can't
bring paper. They're not allowed to bring anything with a
battery. And they look at certain memos, not all that the
White House has agreed to show them. And then, they're not
permitted to share what they've seen with anyone. Not their
constituents. Not other lawmakers."

There may be no more dramatic revelation of
the truth of unaccountable Executive power than when Senate
Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden stated in
2011, "I believe that the American people would be
absolutely stunned, I think members of Congress, many of
them, would be stunned, if they knew how the PATRIOT Act was
being interpreted andapplied in practice. I'm going to
insist in significant reform in this area."

He was right. But unlike a patriotic and
courageous whistleblower who has risked his very life to
bring this information to the American people, even an
elected legislator who knew it was a "stunning" abuse of
power did not dare reveal it to the American people.

The notion that Executive power is subject to
meaningful judicial review is another fiction. The FISA
court rubber-stamped 1,788
out of 1,788 applications for wiretapping, allowed by the
Executive only to rule on the processes it claimed to follow
not the actual people being wiretapped. And, even more
disturbing, the N.Y. Times has revealed that
the 11-member secret FISA court, including 10 conservative
Republicans appointed by John Roberts, has become an
antidemocratic Star Chamber that has not only failed to
limit but actually expanded Executive Power to spy on us.

Adjudicating a case in which the ACLU sued to
obtain illegal Executive "kill lists," federal judge Colleen
McMahon wrote,
"I find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents
that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our
Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions
that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution
and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a
secret." The Patriot Act was specifically designed to
preclude meaningful judicial review.

And the U.S. mass media, although some
journalists have done important work revealing Executive
wrongdoing, primarily serves to convey Executive "talking
points" to the public on an hourly basis.

The media dutifully broadcast around
the nation former FBI agent and current House Intelligence
Chair Mike Rogers' unproven claim that
Edward Snowden is a traitor because of "changes we can
already see being made by the folks who wish to do us harm."
The media then reported that Senate Intelligence Committee
member Saxby Chambliss said that
"the bad guys are now changing their methods of operation."
Then, after we were told that this program would help the
enemy if revealed, anonymous NSA officials were suddenly
made available to discuss it with the Washington Post, Reuters, CNN,
and the AP, which ran a
story headlined "Al-Qaida Said To Be Changing Its Ways After
Leaks" that appeared in newspapers around America.

The charge was hardly credible since the NSA
provided no evidence to support its claim, Snowden had a
strong self-interest in not providing details which could
have helped his prosecution for espionage, and the unnamed
"folks who wish to do us harm" have long known their emails
and phone calls were monitored. But the Executive Branch had
succeeded in its goal of using the mass media to bombard the
American people with these messages to support its indicting
him as a spy.

Authoritarian secrecy and deception is the
beating heart of Executive power. Former Obama
administration official Ronan Farrow, who had a top-secret
clearance, has reported that
"trillions of new pages of text are classified each year,"
and that "a government agency was found to be classifying
the equivalent of 20 million filing cabinets filled with
text." It is obvious that almost none of this would be of
use to "Muslim terrorists," and that the Executive's main
goal is to keep information of its abuses and mismanagement
from reaching taxpayers, which might threaten its funding.
When the Justice Department indicted whistleblower Thomas
Drake for espionage, after he had futilely gone through
proper internal channels to try and correct serious NSA
mismanagement, the Executive’s goal was clearly not "to
protect national security" but to keep the evidence of its
incompetence from reaching American taxpayers.

Eisenhower and the Myth of Presidential
Control Over the Executive Branch

Although those who suggest the U.S. Executive
Branch is subverting democracy are often maligned as
radicals, alarmists, unpatriotic, or worse, it was one of
America's most respected generals and popular presidents who
first brought this issue to public attention 52 years ago.
On January 17, 1961, Dwight David Eisenhower famously warned that
the "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a
large arms industry is new in the American experience. The
total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is
felt in every city, every State house, every office of the
Federal government. In the councils of government, we must
guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by
the military industrial complex. We must never let the
weight of this combination endanger our liberties or
democratic processes."

The man who embodied patriotism itself warned
us that our liberties were threatened at home by the
"military-industrial complex" which we call here the U.S.
Executive Branch, meaning the powerful Executive agencies
and private corporations which lobby for and benefit from
Executive funding, and have today morphed into one entity of
mutual self-interest operating behind a wall of secrecy.

The U.S. Executive Branch derives much of its
legitimacy from the public's belief that it is under the
control of a democratically elected "Commander-in-Chief,"
the president. But in reality, Executive agencies are far
more powerful than any president. The rarely quoted but most
important passage of Eisenhower's speech was that: "this
need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my
official responsibilities in this field with a definite
sense of disappointment."

Even Eisenhower, who knew firsthand the
dangers the Executive Branch posed to democracy, could not
control it. He presided over a period of tremendous growth
in Executive Branch power, and only warned of its threat to
freedom as he was leaving office. And if even Ike could not
control it then, how can a far weaker Obama control far more
powerful, sophisticated and insidious Executive Branch power
today?

Yes, citizens get to vote for president every
four years. But the candidates of both major parties support
the same basic Executive Branch military policies. Voters in
the 2012 presidential election had no one to vote for if
they opposed drone strikes, threats to attack Iran,
continued senseless war in Afghanistan, or the global
deployment of U.S. assassins. And even when they vote for a
candidate like Obama who promised greater Executive
transparency in 2008, such promises are broken
post-election.

But the myth of presidential control over the
Executive Branch goes far deeper. Because Americans expect
their president to function as Commander-in-Chief,
presidents are forced to pretend to be in charge of what
they are not. Barack Obama did not admit that he felt
"trapped" by the military into escalating in Afghanistan, as
Bob Woodward has reported. Neither a president nor Secretary
of State Clinton admitted publicly what they acknowledge
privately: that because of military opposition they were
forced to betray their own values by failing even
to fight for ratification of such basic humanitarian
measures as banning landmines and cluster bombs, let alone
even beginning to bring the military-industrial complex to
heel.

As giant Executive agencies relentlessly act
out their bureaucratic imperatives of seeking to justify
bigger budgets by manufacturing new missions—whether spying
on millions of Americans, establishing a network of police
operations around the country, conducting signature drone
strikes against unnamed suspects, and expanding
assassination around the globe—the notion that even a
president who wants to can significantly reduce these
activities is not only naive but dangerous to preserving
democracy itself.

A Threat to Rationality

Executive claims that its immense spying on
countless Americans at home is needed to protect them from
terrorists abroad threatens rationality itself.

Imagine an old fashioned scale with U.S.
Executive power on the left side, and the threat it claims
to be protecting us against on the right. On the left we
have the 1.4 million employees of the Pentagon, CIA, NSA,
Department of Homeland Security and FBI, etc., 1,000 other
government entities and 2,000 private companies located in
17,000 buildings collecting data on hundreds of millions of
Americans' phone calls and Internet communications a year,
and the world's largest arsenal of weaponry.

On the right we have the handful of Al-Qaeda
members whom Mr. Obama on May 23 downgraded to a minor
threat, and a few thousand Pakistani, Yemeni and North
African tribesmen who would focus entirely on their domestic
concerns if our leaders would stop bombing and assassinating
them. Can anyone in the right mind claim we need to fund the
giant apparatus at the left to protect us from the minuscule
group of folks on the right?

There may no greater evidence of the ability
of fear, self-interest and fantasy to overwhelm rationality
than the fact that the U.S. Congress does not even discuss
whether the Executive really needs to spend over
$1 trillion a year to protect us in a world in which
China and Russia are no longer even our enemies, and the
most effective way to reduce whatever terrorist threats do
exist is clearly to engage in old-fashioned police work with
local police forces who see us as allies, not enemies.

And the single most irrational fact of
American "national security" policy today, as several dozen
of America's most knowledgeable national security experts
have
attested, is that this $1 trillion a year is actually
not protecting but endangering us,
by creating far more enemies than it kills, increasing the
risk of more 9/11s, destabilizing friendly governments, and
making it more likely that Pakistani nuclear materials will
fall into anti-American hands.

Information Management to Protect a Failed
Institution

Although the Executive is America's most
powerful institution, it has an Achilles heel. The private
sector produces wealth and builds; the Executive consumes
wealth and destroys. It thus depends for its life on
convincing taxpayers to fund it despite its 70-year record
of failure, wasted resources and innumerable lies.

The U.S. Executive Branch has not won any of
the major wars it initiated over the past 50 years,
sending over 62,697 American youths to their deaths and
wounding over 185,625 in Indochina and Iraq, on the basis of
lies. Its support for the Shah of Iran and invasion of Iraq
brought to power and strengthened its major Middle East foe;
its costly intelligence agencies supported the Mujahidin in
Afghanistan who became al Qaeda and the Taliban, failed to
prevent 9/11, falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction, and failed to predict the Arab
Spring. It has today turned most of Latin America against it
and wasted $4-6
trillion long-term on its losing wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, even as China has invested similar sums in
buying up many of the world's resources, leading the clean
energy revolution, and moving to become the dominant Asian
power.

The Executive Branch has succeeded on its own
terms, steadily accumulating power for 70 years now. But it
is clearly an institution that has failed the American
people. If Americans realized this truth they might likely
dramatically reduce its funding and control its activities.

As a result, Executive officials' top
priority is to maintain secrecy about their countless
failures, and actively propagandize the American public
about real and imagined successes.

For such officials "truth" and "lies" are not
operational categories of thought. The purpose of any
communication with the public or Congress is to further
their agency's mission. Lying is rewarded not punished, as
when General Stanley McChrystal was promoted after knowingly lying
when he said that Pat Tillman was killed by enemy rather
than friendly fire. The only firing offense is telling the
truth, as when State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley was
dismissed for stating that
"what is being done to Bradley Manning is ridiculous and
counterproductive and stupid on the part of the Department
of Defense."

Executive Branch officials almost always lie
in those cases where they are acting illegally or could be
embarrassed, as when National Intelligence Director James
Clapper responded "no,
not wittingly," when asked on March 26 by Senator Ron Wyden
"does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or
hundreds of millions of Americans?" (Clapper further compounded
his lie by claiming he had misunderstood the simple
question. Senator Wyden had sent it over to him the day
before.)

Given their decades-long record of misleading
the American public about life-and-death issues, from the
Tonkin Gulf to Iraq's fictional weapons of mass destruction,
it is naive to give Executive officials the benefit of the
doubt when they respond to charges of abuses. It is only
logical to assume they are lying unless they provide
evidence to the contrary. This is why they need to be sworn
in and indicted for perjury when they lie to Congress.

The Pentagon Papers is the gold standard for
understanding how Executive officials think since they have
rarely written down their inner thoughts since. The Pentagon
Papers reveal that Executive Branch leaders were not only
indifferent to Vietnamese life, they were even willing to
betray American youth for their own political ends. While
the Johnson administration publicly claimed it was sending
U.S. troops to help the people of Vietnam, Deputy Defense
Secretary John McNaughton described U.S.
Executive Branch objectives as "70% to avoid a humiliating
U.S. defeat. 20% to keep SVN (South Vietnam) from Chinese
hands. 10% to permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better,
freer way of life."

And while Robert McNamara was publicly
claiming the U.S. never killed civilians, he privately wrote that
"the picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or
seriously injuring 1000 noncombatants a week, while trying
to pound a tiny backward nation into submission (might)
produce a costly distortion in the American national
consciousness and in the world image of the United States."

McNamara did not express concern about his
mass murder. He focused only on keeping it secret from the
world and the American citizens he claimed to represent.

Daniel Ellsberg, in Secrets, tells of
accompanying McNamara on a plane trip from Saigon to
Washington, during which McNamara privately stated "we've
put more than a hundred thousand more troops into the
country over the last year and there's been no improvement.
Things aren't any better at all. That means the underlying
situation is reallyworse!" But when McNamara deplaned he
told a crowd of reporters:

"Gentlemen, I've just come back from Vietnam,
and I'm glad to be able to tell you that we're showing great
progress in every dimension of our effort. I'm very
encouraged by everything I've seen and heard on my trip."
(2)

Such countless lies betrayed a generation of
American youth. Many volunteered to fight in Vietnam because
they idealistically believed their leaders' public
statements that the U.S. goal was to help the Vietnamese
people. Others were forced to fight and die as their leaders
concealed from them that they knew their strategy wasn't
working. And U.S. Executive Branch leaders' lawless mass
murder of the innocent fatally divided their nation at home,
creating deep fissures which continue until today. Had
Americans simply been told the truth by their leaders, had
U.S. leaders said in public what they wrote in private, the
war might well have ended years earlier, and thousands of
American lives and tens of billions of dollars would have
been saved.

As the Executive Branch now extends its
operations in the U.S., its bureaucratic interests are
similarly opposed to those of the American people. Huge sums
given to the Pentagon, CIA and NSA diverts money from the
public's top economic needs: investment in infrastructure,
education and a high tech manufacturing base. And so the
Executive must wage constant disinformation campaigns
offering relief from exaggerated fear, false accomplishments
and, above all, operations to defeat criticism.

The key concept for understanding how the
U.S. Executive manages to convince taxpayers to fund it
despite its countless failures is that of "information
operations." In The Operators Michael Hastings
explained that the military officially draws a distinction
between its behavior toward the American and foreign
publics, as when David Petraeus explained in April 2008 that
"public affairs is there to inform [domestic audiences] and
Information operations is there to influence foreign
audiences." (3)

The latter refers to
"actions taken to affect adversary information and
information systems while defending one's own information
and information systems."

But Hastings learned in Iraq and Afghanistan
that there was no real distinction between information
operations directed at foreign or domestic audiences.
Referring to General William Caldwell's attempts to gain
more funding for training Afghan troops, Hastings reported
that "despite his own statements that information operations
are for 'foreign audiences', he'll assign a team of American
information operation specialists to target the U.S. public.
The IO team, which had received training in conducting
psychological operations, is tasked with convincing visiting
senators and other VIPs to give Caldwell more funds." (4)

The concept of "information operations" is
the most accurate one to describe Executive Branch
officials' communications with the American people as well.
When Dick Cheney appeared on
"Meet the Press" to warn of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction, ties to al Qaeda and to claim the U.S. would be
greeted as liberators, he was conducting information
operations designed to build support for the Bush invasion
and occupation of Iraq. It did not even occur to him to
think in terms of "lies" or "truths."

Hastings reported that the U.S. military
employs spends $4.7 billion a year to employ 27,000
"information operation specialists"—the equivalent of the
army's largest division—as well as private P.R. firms. (5)
Yes, a whole division of troops is deployed not to fight the
"enemy," but to manipulate the American public.

The other Executive agencies—the CIA, NSA,
FBI, Departments of Homeland Security, State and
Defense—spend billions more to convince Americans to fund
them. Every day Executive Agencies send out countless
messages on an hourly basis, through briefings of
journalists, press releases, press conferences,
congressional testimony, appearances on radio and TV, etc.,
designed to build public support for its activities.

Overall, these information operations in the
U.S. seek to 1) build a positive image of Executive
actions—claims of military success, captures or kills of
terrorists, turning Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)
assassins into heroes, etc. 2) sell its main product,
"protection." The Executive sells "relief from fear,"
seeking to convince a fearful post-9/11 public that is
protecting them despite the massive evidence that it is not;
and 3) to "attack adversary information" emanating from U.S.
journalists, liberal Members of Congress and whistleblowers
which reveals truths that Executive officials fear could
reduce public support for their funding and activities.

Anatomy of Two Information Operations: From a
Remote Afghan Village to the White House

Nothing more embodies the Executive's
Information Operations than JSOC. We have already noted
Jeremy Scahill's report describing how JSOC assassins
cold-bloodedly murdered a pro-American Afghan police chief
and four other family members, and then dug the bullets out
of the bodies of three mothers they had murdered to try and
cover up their crimes. (6)

Since they dug the bullets out of these
bodies while still on the scene, they clearly knew almost
immediately that they had made a mistake. But they placed
hoods and shackles on seven surviving family members, took
them to prison, mistreated them and finally released them
after three days. They then issued a series of press
releases falsely claiming they had taken fire, that
"insurgents" had killed the three women in an "honor
killing," been killed by knives rather than bullets, that
JSOC commandoes were "heroes" who had tried to rescue them.

Eventually a British reporter named Jerome
Starkey published the truth in the Times of London.
McChrystal's press team then declared the story
"categorically false," and attacked Starkey personally
claiming he was not a "credible journalist." Finally, as the
entire pro-American province was up in arms about the
murders, JSOC was forced to admit they had killed the women
but continued to falsely claim the unarmed men at the dance
had shown "hostile intent." And, Scahill reports, he has now
spent three years fruitlessly trying to obtain internal
military reports on the incident. The cover-up has continued
until today.

This incident contains all the essential
elements of the Executive Branch's typical media strategy,
even or especially when they know they have committed a
crime: (1) acting in secret; (2) lying if the secret is
revealed; (3) attacking journalists or others who reveal
their lies; (4) conducting a cover-up; and (5) claiming it
was a justified mistake or aberration if the cover-up fails.
The strategy has worked. Nothing more illustrates the
success of Executive "information operations" that its
turning a band of lawless JSOC assassins into America's
greatest heroes.

Under Bush but vastly expanded by Obama, the
Executive secretly switched from
a small number of "targeted drone strikes" aimed at "senior
al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders" to indiscriminate "signature
strikes" killing thousands of people whose names they did
not know based on patterns of association. Under Obama a
large infrastructure of drones, drone operators and
targeting personnelhad been assembled, but they had run out
of named targets. So they moved on to "signature strikes"
which, a study has
just revealed, are often even more bloody than conventional
bombing despite Executive claims to the contrary.

So when Mr. Obama told Americans
in September 2012 that a drone strike "has to be a situation
in which we can't capture the individual before they move
forward on some sort of operational plot against the United
States," he was conducting an "information operation"
designed to aid his presidential campaign and build support
for U.S. drone killing.

Apologists for drone assassination often cite
polls showing that a large majority of Americans support
drone strikes. But who wouldn't support a fictional version
of drone strikes only surgically conducted against people
actively planning to kill Americans who cannot be stopped
any other way?

But suppose the American people were told the
truth. Imagine if the polling question read "do you support
drone strikes which General McChrystal, former Director of
National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair, and dozens of
other experts say are creating far more enemies than they
kill, primarily kill many civilians and low-level militants
who pose no threat to America, and are thus both endangering
your life and immoral?"

Consent obtained through lies is not consent.
It is victimization, and should be treated as a felony. And
again, when warmaking Executive Branch officials lie, their
lies kill Americans as well as countless foreigners.

Executive Subversion of Congress

The Executive subversion of Congress has gone
even beyond muzzling members of the Intelligence committees.
Scahill reports that it has redefined JSOC assassination and
torture activities as "Advance Force Operations," so they
can avoid even Senate Intelligence Committee oversight and
be "carried out with minimal external oversight for a
significant period of time." (6)

The structural reasons for congressional
rubberstamping Executive warmaking include matters that have
often been discussed since Eisenhower declared that the
military-industrial complex's "total influence—economic,
political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State
house, every office of the Federal government."

The Pentagon has spread huge military bases
around America, providing local constituencies for military
spending in every state and dozens of congressional
districts, as do the large corporations they fund.
Conservative veterans have been a potent domestic lobby for
Executive war-making, and are often elected to Congress. And
of course a dominant factor is campaign contributions from
corporations which benefit from military spending.

Why do even powerful US. senators so fear the
Executive Branch? Part of it is indeed its real power back
in their states or districts. But the answer goes even
deeper. The term "National Security" is the closest thing to
a secular religion in this country, and being accused of
violating it is the political equivalent of being accused of
heresy during the Middle Ages. No senator or congressman
believes that she or he could survive politically were the
Executive to mount a campaign accusing them of violating
"national security." And even more, if the charge could be
proved, they fear being incarcerated themselves.

Executive Subversion of the Mass Media

The mass media's main function today is to
serve as a public relations arm for the Executive. There are
dozens of honest and talented investigative reporters who
expose Executive wrongdoing. But they constitute a small
minority of the nation's mass media, and while they often
deserve their Pulitzers they have at best a marginal impact
on overall Executive behavior.

Washington Post reporter
Dana Priest with Bill Arkin deservedly won plaudits for Top
Secret America, one of the most important books of the
decade. But their reporting had no noticeable impact on the
growth of the Executive Surveillance State. Much such
"adversarial" reporting even has the paradoxical effect of
maintaining the illusion of "free press" while Executive
officials continue their war-making unimpeded by media
reporting, congressional action, or public opinion. There
are also dozens of reporters who, day to day, report
essential facts about Executive activities. The diligent
reader, looking for a story here, a paragraph there, can
piece together much useful information about U.S. warmaking
abroad.

The heart of Executive information operations
in America are the constant stream of media reports based on
the statements by Executive Branch officials. Journalists do
this because their jobs depend upon it. Top journalists,
e.g., covering the Defense, State or Homeland Security
departments, depend on their Executive Branch "sources."
Maintaining their relationships with these officials is
critical to their careers and livelihoods.

Over the last several decades there has been
so much intermingling between top journalistic and Executive
officials that they have become indistinguishable from each
other, a collusion that is on display each year at the White
House Correspondents' Dinner.

CBS correspondent Bernie Kalb capped off his
career by becoming a spokesman for Reagan's State
Department, defending Central American death squad and
contra murders. The present White House spokesman, Jay
Carney, is a former executive. Former Obama spokesman
Robert Gibbs and political director David Axelrod have
landed lucrative gigs with MSNBC, as have dozens of other
Executive Branch officials.

And the ties go even deeper. As the Washington
Post has reported,
"ABC News President BenSherwood is the brother of Elizabeth
Sherwood-Randall, a top national-security adviser to
President Obama. His counterpart at CBS, news division
president David Rhodes, is the brother of Benjamin Rhodes, a
key foreign-policy specialist.CNN's deputy Washington bureau
chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, who until
earlier this year was deputy secretary of state under
Hillary Rodham Clinton. White House press secretary Jay
Carney's wife is Claire Shipman, a veteran reporter for ABC.
And NPR's White House correspondent, Ari Shapiro, is married
to a lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, who joined the White House
counsel's office in April. Biden's current communications
director, Shailagh Murray is married to Neil King, one of
the Wall Street Journal's top political reporters."

What emerges out of this combination of
careerism, well-paying jobs, revolving doors, and even
intermarriage between top Executive officials and
journalists is a shared mindset. Yes, a top journalist can
occasionally point to stories that embarrass government
officials. But even such stories are a drop in the bucket
compared to their day-to-day, hour-by-hour stories conveying
Executive Branch information operations to the public. The
Executive Branch does not tell mass media journalists what
to write. It has absorbed them.

Executive Subversion of the Judiciary

Although judicial rubberstamping of Executive
activities is significant, the Executive Branch subversion
of judicial power goes far deeper, and is far more serious.
Because the Executive dominates Congress, it has had
Congress pass numerous of laws that increase its power and
shield it from judicial redress.

One of the most significant is the "State
Secrets Privilege" which allows the Executive to exclude
from any legal proceeding any evidence that chooses to call
"state secrets," entirely on its own say-so. Under George
Bush this excluded massive evidence of torture and rendition
of suspects from judicial review.

Another example is an amendment to the 2012
National Defense Authorization Act, introduced by Senate
Carl Levin at the behest of the Executive. Guantanamo
detainee lawyer Barry Wingard has summed it
up: "The scariest development in the indefinite detention
battle is that under the National Defense Reauthorization
Act of 2012 recently signed, you as an American citizen can
be detained forever without trial, while the allegations
against you go uncontested because you have no right to see
them."

The NDAA amendment has been challenged in
court by a lawsuit brought by Chris Hedges and others,
including Dan Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky. On September 12,
2012, Judge Katherine Forrest ruled in favor of Hedges et
al., stating that
"the due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment
require that an individual understand what conduct might
subject him or her to criminal or civil penalties. Here, the
stakes get no higher: indefinite military
detention—potential detention during a war on terrorism that
is not expected to end in the foreseeable future, if ever.
The Constitution requires specificity. Courts must safeguard
core constitutional rights."

The Obama administration then appealed her
ruling, and the issue is currently pending either changes in
the law by Congress or a higher court ruling.

Although the NDAA amendment is currently in
legal limbo, its meaning is not. The Executive Branch
asserts its right to indefinitely imprison any American it
chooses without even letting them see the charges against
them let defend themselves in court. The Executive seeks to
effectively eliminate judicial control of its powers to
incarcerate and murder Americans as well as foreigners.

But the most striking example of how the
Executive threatens both democracy and an independent
judiciary is revealed in the case brought by the ACLU and
N.Y. Times in late 2012 demanding information regarding
the administration's legal justification for its kill
program, including its murder of 16-year-old Abdul-Rahman
Al-Awlaki in Yemen, as explained by Jeremy Scahill. (8)

Federal Judge McMahon wrote that White House
secrecy raised "serious issues about the limits on the power
of the Executive Branch under the Constitution and laws of
the United States, and about whether we are indeed a nation
of laws not men." She strongly criticized the Obama
administration for refusing to reveal its criteria for its
program of secret and lawless murder, saying that doing so
would "allow for intelligent discussion of a tactic (like
torture before it) remains hotly debated. It might also help
the public understand the scope of the ill-defined yet vast
and seemingly ever-growing exercise."

But even this judge, who clearly believed
that the Executive was taking actions "incompatible with our
Constitution and laws," felt she could not grant the ACLU's
request because Congress had given the Executive the power
to keep "the reasons for their conclusion a secret."

Conclusion

It is clear that anyone who genuinely cares
about America's core values, not to mention its people, has
no choice but to oppose the threat to democracy posed by the
U.S. Executive Branch. The issue is not simply opposing any
particular Executive injustice. It is recognizing that the
Executive Branch itself is an antidemocratic, authoritarian
institution which does not represent either the interests or
values of the American people.

The American people thus owe it neither their
moral allegiance nor their tax dollars, unless and until it
truly comes to represent them. What this implies for each of
will be the subject of the conclusion to this series.

Fred Branfman's writing has been published in
the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, and many
other publications. He is the author of Voices From the
Plain of Jars, and can be reached at fredbranfman@aol.com.

Notes

(1) Obama’s Wars, by Bob Woodward,
Kindle Location 3410

(2) Secrets, by Dan Ellsberg, pp.
141-2

(3) The Operators, by Michael
Hastings, Kindle Location 3904

(4) The Operators, by Michael
Hastings, Kindle Location 3991

(5) The Operators, by Michael
Hastings, Kindle Location 448

(6) Dirty Wars, by Jeremy Scahill,
Kindle Location 7078

(7) "United States Security Agreements and
Commitments Abroad, Kingdom of Laos,"Hearings Before the
Subcommittee on United States Security Agreements and
Commitments Abroad of the Committee on Foreign Relations,
United States Senate, Ninety-First Congress, First Session,
Part 2, October 20, 21, 22, and 28, 1969, p. 484

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